Vrabel-Russini Jab Proves ESPN Is Keeping ‘Inside the NBA’ Promise

There was some healthy skepticism that ESPN would change Inside the NBA once it began licensing it from TNT Sports. But as the iconic studio show has hit its playoff stride, all signs point to the content remaining unchanged for Ernie Johnson, Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kenny Smith.

When the program was doing its annual “Gone Fishing” graphic for teams that have been eliminated from the playoffs on Sunday night, they put Mike Vrabel and Dianna Russini doing the famous Titanic pose at the front of the boat. For much of the past month, Vrabel and Russini have been in the center of a media tempest after they were photographed holding hands and hugging at an adults-only resort in Arizona. 

This is a sensitive matter for ESPN, which employed Russini for several years before she left in 2023 to become The Athletic‘s lead NFL reporter. ESPN has covered the story on its website—particularly in the form of an extensive report by Ben Strauss—but has largely stayed away from it on its airwaves. Mocking such a story would not be in line with ESPN’s longstanding decorum.

But it’s a new world order now. ESPN began a trend of licensing studio content when it added Peyton and Eli Manning’s Monday Night Football simulcast in 2021, outsourcing all creative and production to Peyton’s Omaha Productions. This continued with the addition of The Pat McAfee Show, which was a forerunner to Inside the NBA in the sense that ESPN has kept its promise not to meddle in the creative process.

After reaching the deal to license the show, ESPN’s president of content, Burke Magnus, vowed that Inside the NBA, which is still produced by TNT, would keep its fabric.

“Of course we’re not going to change the show,” Magnus told Sports Illustrated in 2024 after the deal was announced. “Why would we take something so successful and so iconic, bring it over and then be like, ‘We know better, we’re gonna change it.’ … We don’t want to change it. We don’t want to interject new talent into it. We don’t want to really do anything to it.”

It was clear on the show’s first night on the network, when O’Neal and Barkley personally called out Lakers big man Deandre Ayton, that the show would keep its irreverence intact. 

Not everyone, however, has been a fan. Rob Perez, the longtime NBA social media personality who goes by the moniker World Wide Wob, said that the “brand’s legacy is getting tarnished with every episode” in a thread on Twitter/X last week. 

“From the lack of creative segments/guests, to losing longtime producers, to the shortened shows on ABC, to these guys not paying attention anymore, to the erratic scheduling and varying channels…long live the po-lice presence days, but it’s over,” Perez wrote.

It’s a fair gripe that the show doesn’t have as much time as it used to have on TNT, particularly when it is on ABC for postgame shows that used to go into the early morning hours on the East Coast. There was also an irregular schedule that backloaded the dates that ESPN licensed from TNT—in exchange for Big 12 football and basketball games—to be mostly later in the season and in the playoffs. Nevertheless, ESPN/ABC will deliver something we haven’t seen before with Inside the NBA in a few weeks when it is the official studio show of the NBA Finals for the first time.

An ESPN spokesperson declined to comment on the segment that included Vrabel and Russini.